NHL and Olympics never a match made in heaven

Ask not what your country can do for the Olympics but what the Olympics can do for you.

The chances of there ever being another great Olympic hockey story were always wind-chill low, but the NHL thought it would take a chance.

So for five Winter Games the league allowed its best players to try to capture some of that 1980 Lake Placid magic, an event that did more for hockey than anything since the Zamboni.

Nope. Didn’t work. Winter will just have to get along without the best winter game’s best players.

Here we are now, back where we were, with leftovers and amateurs in Pyeongchang and the NHL wondering what it could have been thinking.

Now it is thinking that taking three weeks out of its season when competition for attention is lowest (between football and baseball there is only LeBron), when risk of injury is high and when expenses are no longer picked up by the IOC … well, patriotic gestures may not be worth the metal the medals are made of.

The NHL had counted on there being no primer time than the Olympics, which is around midnight for those with basic cable.

They might have imagined that the odd prospect of seeing Patrick Kane against Duncan Keith would keep everybody up until dawn.

The NHL in the Olympics turned out to be of absolutely no interest to anybody, including the players, who pretended to care.

Not even the TV prize teams from Canada and the U.S. could compel attention, like watching two cousins arguing over the doughnuts, Tim Hortons or Dunkins. (Hortons wins as does, inevitably, Canada.)

This was never an idea whose time was due. The NHL going to the Olympics? Well, why not? It went to Las Vegas.

What the NHL discovered was the unbreakable Winter Olympics rule: If it doesn't wear a short sequined skirt and Prokofiev isn't playing in the background, it might as well be curling.

The NHL did not get what it wanted out of its trade off with the greed gnomes from Lausanne, Switzerland. What the Olympic folks wanted is not clear, pre-hyped celebrities maybe. Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin may not be LeBron James and Stephen Curry, but their names have greater resonance than any luger who ever lived.

There was no doubt what the NHL wanted. It was after the kind of boost for hockey the Olympics gave the NBA, except it had it backward. Every basketball Dream Team is already more famous than any Olympian, including Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps.

Napoleon once marveled that men will die for medals. All the NHL was risking was another tooth or two.

Wisdom came from Tim Taylor, the U.S. hockey coach in Lillehammer, Norway. Taylor coached the last all-amateur U.S. team.

"The Olympics ought to be more than a vacation," he said.

For the hockey pros the Olympics were never more than time off from work, which is how the NBA players tend to treat their Olympic experience. Angola tonight, tee time in the morning.

It simply takes more than a nation's initials on a hockey jersey to make millionaires happily carry their own bags. Pro hockey players resented the same inconvenience as other athletes for whom the Olympics is not the greatest competition in their sport.

This is true in every sport that has bigger rewards than Olympic medals. Golf in Rio, remember? Who remembers tennis?

“I couldn't even get room service," complained Chris Evert the first year they let the tennis pros in.

The NHL wanted something like a repeat of Lake Placid, clearly and forever the feel-good moment of all Winter Olympics when a bunch of U.S. amateurs won the gold medal and loved every bit of inconvenience that went with it.

The NHL already has bigger prizes than the Olympics, its own Stanley Cup, as well as the World Cup. The best hockey ever played in the Olympics would be just another tournament.

And there is no Soviet Union to play the villain this time. A team called Olympic Athletes from Russia is very likely going to win the thing, although we will just have to take somebody’s word for it.